This blog provides stories that Denyse O'Leary, a Toronto-based journalist, has found to be of interest, as she covers the growing intelligent design controversy. It supports her book By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg 2004). Does the universe - and do life forms - show evidence of intelligent design? If so, Carl Sagan was wrong and so is Richard Dawkins. Now what?

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Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Friend David Warren alerts me to this obvious example of legacy media misrepresentation of science issues:

The New York Times is determined to show that women are discriminated against in the sciences; too bad the facts say otherwise. A new study has “found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests,” claims a July 25 article by Tamar Lewin—thus, the underrepresentation of women on science faculties must result from bias. Actually, the study, summarized in the July 25 issue of Science, shows something quite different: while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges. Either the Times is deliberately concealing the results of the study or its reporter cannot understand the most basic science reporting.

It is neither, Heather. It is this: They dare not say what they know to be true. The ghosts of past virtuous falsehoods would rise to condemn them.

Ah yes, one naturally thinks of former Harvard prez Larry Summers, whose only crime was to say what everyone actually knows, and Heather MacDonald repeats:

... boys are found more often than girls at the outer reaches of the bell curve of abstract reasoning ability.

Or, as I like to put it, far more men win Nobel Prizes - and far more men sit on Death Row - than women. That's just how life is. If you want to live in the middle of life, be a woman. You will live longer, for one thing.

MacDonald continues,

If you’re hoping to land a job in Harvard’s math department, you’d better not show up with average math scores; in fact, you’d better present scores at the absolute top of the range. And as studies have shown for decades, there are many more boys than girls in that empyrean realm. Unless science and math faculties start practicing the most grotesque and counterproductive gender discrimination, a skew in the sex of their professors will be inevitable, given the distribution of top-level cognitive skills. Likewise, boys will be and are overrepresented among math dunces—though the feminists never complain about the male math failure rate.

Yes, but lots of advocates will make money forcing them to do just that. Read the rest. Kudos, MacDonald!